Cold Cathode (Scanner) Light

seems nice... (I wish I had this much time to devote to stuff like this)
 
Very nice indeed.we may be looking at a "common man's LED" setup here.
 
Common man's LED? I don't find it terribly common to have oodles of old scanners laying around freely available for dissasembly :P

I'd love to try this for growing some herbs indoors, but alas, I don't have any scanners.
 
See, thats the problem. White CC tubes are not readily available in large-ish quantitys for just anyone.

LEDs and heatsinks are :p . I got a whole LED setup for a 29g tank for about $100. So far the entire project is under $200, and I have just about everything I need, though I still would like to find a bus bar for a decent price.
 
:eek: Where did you get the LED's from? I was looking at LED setups, my wallet saw the prices and shook it's head no,But he mentioned earlier a place or two where you can obtain the cathode tubes for under 10$.
 
Looking on ebay it looks like one could get 2 fully functional scanners from 2 different people for $20 total. With shipping. I have not even looked at my local resale shop yet. I got the 2 scanners I have from people who didn't want them anymore. A lot of people have scanners that they don't want. I recently joined my local freecycle yahoo group. Seems like that would be a good place to find something like this but my town is too small.
 
Yep, USD 7.99 per set of 2, for those 'fancy' car lights, being shock and water proof hanging under cars, they are ideal for a tank-light setup I'd say. Have no pictures today, but half of my lights where off yesterday and still the same pearling and light. (As you can see in the pictures of the PU's, there are 2 groups of 8 connected each to the main terminal of the hood. I simply disconnected 1 group for now.

So you look at USD 28 off the shelf cost for those 8 lights!

Less Heat is the main 'winner' over LED-setup, and related, space needed is very little. Optimizing the hood from what I have now, you can go as low as 5-6cm for the total height from top of the tank. Low power-consumption and all.

Or put the PU's outside the hood and you talk 2-3cm.

Lets wait for the testing, first impressions make it a very good option to me.
 
Ok, CC gets points for cool operation and costs. But LEDs get points for compact space and not needing wiring like what you have, not to mention not needing individual power units plus the main PSU. And we won't throw buck pucks into the mix, because frankly those are not needed when a 20c resistor works just fine.
 
No pun intended...It starts to look like we're getting into a Nerd-fight....lol

Compact space..mmh, from threads I've seen on Luxeon units, there's a massive heatsink. The power-units I use are all individual units, but the units for the commercial ones are 2 lights on 1 unit, saving some wiring and space.

Major drawback for the not so handy amongst us, ou've got quite a drawing with diodes, resistors, power-supply etc, which I'd like to take up some day soon for sure. But level of DIY-project, the CC wins for now (despite my 'monstrous cabling') Using a bush-bar and some other wiring-situations would bring that down anyway.
Using the commercial units is really a piece of cake.
 
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